How Far Should Readers Trust You?

Can your readers trust you? Can you trust me?

I’d like to think that whatever degree of trust you give me is warranted, that my research on the brain and creativity is rigorous and my suggestions for using that information to get around resistance is helpful and valid.

Rarely does neuroscientific research apply directly to writing, however. To interpret what the findings might mean for writers, I extrapolate and make assumptions. I am an educated, intelligent and enthusiastic reader, but I am not a neuroscience expert. Despite my best efforts, I may have misinterpreted or misrepresented facts.

I may not be as trustworthy as I’d like to be. You may trust me more than you should. Your readers may trust you more than they should. Some of the misplaced trust is due to writers’ lazy brains (mine and yours). And some is due to readers’ lazy brains.

How We Fail Our Readers and Ourselves

Stanford University psychologist Sam Wineburg and his team are exploring why nearly all of us are such poor judges of what to trust on the Internet and what we might to do improve.

I encourage you to read the entire article I found this information in, “The Real Fake News Crisis” by Katy Steinmetz (Time, August 20, 2018). Until you find a copy, I’ll share key points from Wineburg’s and other studies:

• no matter what our age, education level or expertise with digital tech, Americans fail to ask important questions about content when we browse
• on average, we believe fake news at least 20% of the time (this includes everyone, not just the “other side” of the political divide)
• we retweet links without reading them
• we rely too much on search engines and make erroneous assumptions about how they work
• 23% of respondents to a Pew poll “said they had shared a make-up news story” and 14% did so knowing the story was false.

If you use the Internet in your research, some of what you believe is true, isn’t. What you write based on that misinformation will be flawed.

Why We Fail, aka Brain Heuristics

Most writers don’t fail to be trustworthy because we don’t care or because we intend to deceive. We consume, pass on and expand misinformation because our brains depend on shortcuts.

Running a human brain is expensive. Your brain makes up roughly 3% of your body’s mass, but it uses 20 – 30% or more of your body’s supply of oxygen and glucose.

To make such a big brain evolutionarily viable, humans evolved the first energy efficiency measures: cognitive shortcuts psychologists call “heuristics.” (My first sources on heuristics were Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard Wired Habits by Wray Herbert.)

Most of the time the shortcuts serve us. We really don’t need to scrutinize the ingredients of mayonnaise or toothpaste we’ve used for years or pay the same kind of attention to driving home as we do when driving on an unfamiliar six lane freeway.

The best part about heuristics is that we use them without having to think about it. The worst about heuristics is that we usethem without thinking about it. Remember, according to neurologists like David Eagleman, at least 95% of what goes on in your brain is beyond or below the level of conscious awareness.

As it says on the book jacket of Herbert’s Second Thought:

“Yet these hard-wired shortcuts, mental wonders though they may be, can also be perilous. They can distort our thinking in ways that are often invisible to us, leading us to make poor decisions, to be easy targets for manipulators…and they can even cost us our lives.”

The Familiarity and Frequency Heuristics

Our efficient brains do as little as possible with routine stuff. We assume familiar things are safe and frequent messages are true.

The more familiar I am to you, the more you will trust me, even when I’m wrong. (And the more familiar you are to your readers, the more they trust you, even when you’re wrong.) The longer you’ve read this blog, the more often you’ve heard or seen references to this blog, my name or my book, the more likely you are to fall into the Familiarity and Frequency Heuristics when you read what I post.

Writers who are not familiar with me and my writing are more likely to question my sources and interpretations and to ask the questions we should all ask whenever we’re online:

• Is this really true?
• How do I know it’s true?
• How would I know if it’s false or misleading?

If you read my book, you probably trust me more and rightly so. My book is published by a respected publisher (Penguin/Random House). For centuries publishers have edited and fact-checked what they printed.

The assumption that we can trust books, magazines and newspapers from familiar and reliable publishers makes sense in the physical world, where writing is curated by experts and where it’s easy to identify hack-publishers we don’t trust. It is remarkably naive to bring this assumption to the Internet where anyone can “publish” anything. So why we do make that irrational and naïve mistake?

Steinmetz points out:

“Newspapers used to physically separate hard news and commentary, so our minds could easily grasp what was what. But today two-thirds of Americans get news from social media, where posts from publishers get the same packaging as birthday greetings and rants. Content that warrants an emotional response is mixed with things that require deeper consideration. ‘It all looks identical,’ says Harvard research Claire Wardle, ‘so our brain has to work harder to make sense of those different types of information.’”

Our brains don’t like to work harder. But we owe it our readers to be aware of how we are influenced by our brains’ heuristics. We have an obligation to challenge ourselves to be careful, critical curators of the information we use and to write carefully and analytically even when we write for emotional impact.

First Decision Heuristic

Because second-guessing ourselves often wastes time and energy, humans evolved the tendency to stick a decision once we make it. This heuristic can hold sway even in the face of mounting evidence that the decision is faulty.

When we feel rushed, urgent or overwhelmed, we respond from our limbic system to make fast decisions based on habits and previous experience. Snap judgments make complete sense when we’re facing a familiar or physical threat, but not when we face unique challenges or need time to think through a complex issue.

The very nature of the internet, social media and the news overwhelm us and create a false sense that everything is urgent and negative.

The danger of the First Decision heuristic is intensified by confirmation bias, our tendency to inflate the credibility of information that confirm what we already believe and to dismiss out of hand what doesn’t.

What Can We Do to Counter Misinformation

According to Professor David Rand (quoted by Steinmetz):

“You just have to stop and think. All of the data we have collected suggestions that’s the real problem. It’s not that people are being super-biased and using their reasoning ability to trick themselves into believing crazy stuff. It’s just that people aren’t stopping. They’re rolling on.”

What can we do as writers to increase our own trustworthiness and make a small dent in the massive problem of misinformation? I’ll share my ideas in an upcoming post. Please share yours now in a comment and we’ll make that post a conversation.